To paraphrase your 1950-born uncle, who boasted that he attended the Woodstock Festival: I was there when the internet was born, I, sir!
Posted at 7:00 p.m
After all, I didn’t witness the birth of the Internet (1983), but rather its emergence (in the 1990s). Gradually, the Internet has become embedded in our lives.
I remember the sound of the phone modem connecting us to the World Wide Web. I remember the magazines we sold in grocery stores to guide us to the best sites. Netscape, AOL, La Toile du Quebec. I remember AltaVista, a powerful “search engine”. From [email protected], my first email address.
I also remember our collective naivety. The future would be communal thanks to the inevitable democratization that this decentralized network would bring where the corporatist will could not take root, that was contradictory.
The future would also be intelligent, I would even say that it was considered inevitably more intelligent than our late 20th century: stupidity could not survive all this knowledge that accumulated there at the end of our keyboards Dell computers.
By 1997 we were really wondering how stupidity could survive so many people able to take courses at Harvard or the Sorbonne, consult the works of the Library of Congress remotely, and get real-time information on the best media to check the world…
Anyone who dared to predict that the digital 21st century would not necessarily be an ideal of knowledge was rejected: Technology is neutral!
Technology is of course neutral. Of course, it’s the use we make of the technology that determines whether it’s harmful or useful.
Still, the times were decidedly optimistic: the internet would liberate humanity in a thousand ways. In fact, by historical osmosis, we had the same optimism about the Internet as we had about the fall of the Soviet empire…
Yes, the Internet was a tremendous advance: one of mankind’s great inventions. But the Internet is also a giant incubator of stupidity, spreading it, stupidity, at a very, very high rate.
My favorite anecdote about the dumbing down power of the Internet concerns the Flat Earth Society: in 1997, when a fire destroyed this Flat Earth Society’s list of subscribers, there were only a few subscribers (3500) to their newsletter (sent by mail)…
We thought this was the end of this false idea of a flat earth.
We were wrong: the Internet has revived it in an extravagant way1, making it possible to spread it to as many people as possible and to recruit more followers than ever before.
Another manifestation of the pernicious side of the internet: We are just emerging from a pandemic in which parallel realities made up of untruths raised to the truth have radicalized millions of people who believe that everything is institutionalized by just one of the media, everywhere, at all times Lie is The Deep State…
And that the “truth” will come out in a Nuremberg 2.0 trial where people like me will be tried and hanged.
That this digital dissemination of alternative facts, I swear to you, was not dominant on the radar of “tomorrow” internet thinkers in the late 1990s.
Here we are in the day after tomorrow of the digital year 2000 and, oh man, the great battle of imagination is that of true and false…
How can you distinguish one from the other?
It is less and less a question of technology and more and more a question of faith. Access to all the knowledge in the world hasn’t stopped the progression of stupidity, quite the opposite.
In 2023 we are at the beginning of another era, that of artificial intelligence. It’s huge, the AI of course. But I feel like we’re not much more vigilant about the dark side of AI than we were in 1993 about the dark side of the emerging web.
Everyone laughs at ChatGPT, that algorithm that can write a song like the Rolling Stones, write a dissertation on the mystery of the pyramids, or write a column like Denise Bombardier.
We laugh at ChatGPT’s bugs, but I’m reading what the robot is laying, and funnily enough, I hear the sound of my first modem… Everything is being refined.
Artificial intelligence can now create “deep fake” videos, deep fakes that make someone say things they’ve never said, make someone do things they’ve never done… A porn movie for example .
Take the world’s most popular podcast host, Joe Rogan. He would have received Justin Trudeau at The Joe Rogan Experience2… That interview exists, but it never happened. It was created from scratch. The result of the deepfakes is imperfect, but stunning to the untrained eye. The same for the ear.
The result will certainly be perfect in 5, 10 or 15 years.
Imagine a pandemic with a video of Horacio Arruda or Anthony Fauci saying things they didn’t say about the virus. Imagine what you want, AI will make reality with fake.
I don’t know if the real will be separated from the fake in 5, 10 or 15 years, especially when you know that millions of people prefer the reassuring fake to the hair-raising real.
From artificial intelligence to artificial reality, there is inevitably only one step.